


Wake

by DrGraves



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: As you do, Catholicism, Funeral, Halloween, Horror, M/M, Spooky, classic horror, halloween fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:14:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27307579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrGraves/pseuds/DrGraves
Summary: He could care less about the word of God and comfort as hollow as the bell-less tower. He’s not here for God. Now that he thinks about it, never has been. He’s here for Frank.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Kudos: 6





	Wake

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, my friends. Stay safe x

Dressed in their Sunday best—tarblack suits dark as the new day is holy, praise God—Ray, Mikey, and Gerard arrive at the funeral. It’s a shining, crisp, silver disk of a blue October day, cold enough to hurt, but too dry to snow. They arrive alone, in long, heavy coats. 

To Ray the church is familiar, in the hazy, will-less way childhood had brought him here. His mother, mostly, was the driving force of his attendance, rather than loyalty to the Christain faith. ‘Cause you don’t really believe in God when you’re a kid, he thinks, eyeing up the gray brick belltower, absent of a bell now for thirty years. All you care about when you’re eight years old is sitting through the service and trying not to implode from boredom, taking in words you don’t care about but that make you feel just guilty enough to try. He’s neither glad nor guilty that he stopped going to church a long time ago. He’s not here for the service anyway. He could care less about the word of God and comfort as hollow as the bell-less tower. He’s not here for God. Now that he thinks about it, never has been. He’s here for Frank.

Gerard clasps Mikey’s hand as they climb the steps to the service. Ray feels like a vestige, a drifting tail in their broken rank of three. There’s this gaping hole by his side, a big empty that just four days ago Frank would have filled. Mikey has his brother’s hand to hold, but Ray drifts on the outside. For now, he thinks. Just for now. 

Then Mikey reaches out, takes him by the forearm, and squeezes his hand in wordless reassurance. Mikey’s always been the glue, he thinks, with a rush of affection. He keeps Ray and Gerard from spinning off into the far, cold reaches of the universe. Keeps their feet on the ground so they can hear their steps on the marble floors as they walk down the aisle and take their collective seat in a pew. Remembering the life of Frank Iero. 

Ray feels a sudden, childish urge to look down and pick at the velvet seat cushions instead of looking forward. Forward is where the coffin is. Open, lined with velvet of deep red like arterial spray. And inside is Frank. Just how he’d looked at the wake the previous day. The mortician had spared no expense in dressing him in a suit the color of smoke. His hands, crossed over his chest, manicured in a way they’d never been while he was alive, are intertwined demurely over his red silk tie. _Bookworm,_ his knuckles read. Ray imagines Frank’s living hands, darkly inked, heavy fast and dirty on a fretboard, and he can’t sit still. 

Mikey nudges him with a pointy elbow and tells him to stop wiggling. Ray wipes his palms on his slacks and tries his best, but his leg starts jogging of its own accord. Mikey presses two fingers against it, which stills the outflow of tension. Ray looks over at Gerard. His eyes are bright green in contrast to the red of his tie and drapery, and are turned towards Frank and the empty pulpit, glazed over in deep thought. His lips part and Ray leans closer, into the intervening space occupied by Mikey to hear what he’s saying. 

“‘. . . Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death,’” Gerard says. His words bleed into a ghoulish grin full of teeth and then it’s his turn to get elbowed by Mikey. Mikey hisses something in his brother’s ear and Gerard schools his features, pulls down his lips.

“If you two keep acting suspicious you’re gonna get dragged out of here by your ears,” Mikey says, low enough so the somber family in the pew ahead of them can’t overhear. 

“By who, you?” Gerard murmurs, trying in vain to put his teeth away. He can’t quite do it, so he takes his handkerchief out of his pocket and uses it to demurely conceal his face. He stows it when he can appear contemplative again. Mikey cuts his eyes at both of them in turn until the deep sound of the organ that begins the funeral service fills the church with a mournful minor chord. 

Ray doesn’t know what kind of service Frank would have liked. If he tried to picture it he couldn’t find it in his head. In his eyes, Frank would never die. He would never have a funeral because he would be dynamo shredding at punk shows for the rest of eternity. He can’t die. Ray won’t let him. His body in the coffin is made less real by the fact that none of his fingerprints are on the service. Something noble and Catholic for the dearly departed. Yet so impersonal Ray almost has no idea who they’re talking about. The guy says something about a “mild spirit” and Gerard’s mouth goes all pinched. Ray doesn’t even have to glance at him to know he’s trying not to grin that terrible smile. Mikey pinches him to keep him on a leash. 

“Put the fucking face away,” he says. “You know it’s not time yet.”

Gerard nods, then Mikey eyes Ray. He feels unaccountably guilty under Mikey’s flinty gaze. “Be good,” Mikey tells him. 

“I am being good,” Ray whispers back. A moment later he says, “How can you stand it?”

“Stand what?”

“This ‘mild spirit’ shit,” Ray says. “It’s like it’s not even him.”

“It’s not our concern.”

“It’s his _funeral._ ”

“And it’s not our concern. You know he’s not–”

There’s a smattering of applause, and Mikey turns his eyes forward again, realizing they’ve not paid attention to a good piece of the service. Ray resolves to sit still, play the perfect picture of someone who just lost their best friend. All he does for the rest of the time is listen like he’s back in grade school and picks specks of dirt out from under his fingernails in his lap. Mikey keeps two fingers pressed to his knee. He listens to the speeches and the flow of the eulogy, and the minutes stretch on into an interminable glut. Through the high arching windows, beams of passing sun cut white slices of light down through the air. Ray sees the dust motes dance through them, and he watches.

***

It’s an open viewing, so after all the words are said and the organ played, there’s a lull where anyone in the church can come look in the coffin. Mikey, Gerard, and Ray stand from their pew and fall back. As three of the pallbearers, they and Frank will be the last to leave the church. So they linger like shy ghosts and watch a slow black thread of people drift by Frank, watching him sleep. Most just rest their knuckles on or grasp the edge of the coffin. A few touch his face. 

By the time all have looked their fill, the pastor is turning to follow their procession out the door. He nods at them on his way, his face a perfectly cultivated picture of sincerity. Then, for an inexplicable moment, no one is looking at them. The rest of the attendees are halfway outside, and their fourth pallbearer, Frank's poor uncle, is shaking hands with people at the door. By gaze, they are alone. 

Ray is the first to move. He stands at Frank's right side and wants to take his hand. Not yet, though. Someone has left a bundle of white lilies under his folded hands, so he reaches down to move them so the petals don't tickle his chin. Mikey comes up to Frank's other side, and he and Ray share a knowing glance. 

Gerard's last. He steps up to the beveled head of Frank's coffin, fingertips gentle on the edges as if it's made of glass and he can't bear to leave his fingerprints. Without decorum telling him to control his features, his expression melts, dropped into a hot butter-dish. Yellow and warm like the lily stamens under Frank's chin. His bright eyes crinkle at the corners. He leans down as if in contrition, strands of hair drawing black lines as they fall around his face, and kisses Frank's eyelids.

***

Down the lane and out past the millhouse is the cemetery. To dig Frank's grave they've broken the cool crust of the earth, and the churned mound of nearby dirt is rich, dark, and loose like decay. The itinerary says the pastor is to continue the ceremony, then the guests will file out and into the afternoon and an early blue sunset. Go out for family dinners. Go home. Prop up photos on the mantelpiece. Or maybe do that later. When the memory of the dearly departed Frank Iero has dried like chemicals dripping from photo paper. 

A small cut of the churchgoers gathers now near the fresh grave. Family, close friends, stricken hollow, carrying white handkerchiefs. The younger of the guests stand and let the older creak into folding chairs set out under a shady awning. The chill rain that rolled over town last night has soaked the earth, frozen over, and melted again in the midday sun, so Ray’s shoes stick as he stands with Mikey and Gerard at the rear, behind the last row of chairs. He thinks inexplicably about the earth—how easy it would be now for a stem, new life, to push up through the easy topsoil. 

Mikey wriggles his hand into Ray’s coat pocket, crooking his pinky around Ray’s once he can twist his wrist and find it. Ray doesn’t look at him, but he feels the weight of it. 

The graveside ceremony is shorter, by far, than the one in the church, but long enough that the tip of Ray’s nose is cold by the time they therefore commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And that’s it. The burial will be carried out after the guests are gone. The Bible closes, and the service is over. 

Within twenty minutes the living stand. They’ve gone through the motions of closure on the coffin lids of their own Franks—the little pieces of him he left in their coat pockets. They flow. To each other, to close, reunited family, and into the gaps. Within the hour they’ve flowed to warmer places, and all who are left in the cemetery are Ray, Gerard, Mikey, and the men with spades.

They’ve waited this long, Ray thinks, something alive rising within him. He turns to Mikey. With barely anyone around to see for the first time today, Mikey cracks. He squeezes Ray’s hand like a promise, hidden in a coat pocket from prying eyes. They smile at each other. 

***

Wakers, watchers. Many names exist for those who stay long after a coffin is buried, who smile in solemn churches: ghouls of funeral services. 

Night comes much later and finds three boys sitting in the grass who go by the names waker, watcher. Knees knocking and huddled in each other’s coats for warmth. Everywhere the moon touches is a shimmering veil. They keep watch over Frank’s grave, guard him against the final freeze of an October night. Across the bright silver disk of the moon’s eye, the silhouette of four crows fly. 

As Ray watches them go he comes back to himself. The freshly turned dirt of Frank’s grave is black in the night, and he realizes it’s finally time. His leg starts jogging and this time Mikey makes no move to stop him. Because he’s watching, too, and his glasses glint at the tip of his nose. 

Ray feels thin, like there is something in the air working through him. Gamma radiation, poking him through with a million little holes and drawing him up with twice as many strings. The night’s alive, he thinks, he knows. He’s alive. Gerard is alive. Mikey is alive. 

Frank is alive. 

Then God—as the day is holy, praise God—God blinks. And a tattooed hand claws its way up and bursts through the dirt.


End file.
